A yellow blaze in front of us.
An army of Hatchlings behind.
The semi—on fire, running out of gas, underbrush wadding against the grille as we labored up a steepening slope.
Heat blew back across our faces. Branches crackled beneath the charge of hundreds of tridactyl feet.
Alex was literally standing on the gas pedal, her butt up off the seat, her elbows locked. “Go, go, go, go, go!”
We slowed, slowed, nearly stopping at the rim. The truck coasted for a weightless moment. Then toppled over the edge.
The forested downhill slope, spotted here and there with freshly cut tree trunks, seemed to stretch forever. Gravity seized the truck. We started to pick up pace again.
I shot a look back through the rear window. For the moment the Hatchlings were out of sight behind the brink.
I grabbed the backpack and Patrick’s sleeve. “We got one shot,” I said, fumbling for the door handle. “Let’s take it.”
Alex looked across at me, her ice-green eyes holding on mine. She nodded.
I pulled the door handle and fell back, bringing my brother with me. He grabbed his shotgun before we tumbled out of the cab. We hit a patch of soft dirt—our first luck all day. Even so, his weight crushed into me, bruising my shoulder.
I kicked-pushed him up off me, and we ran a few strides, jumped over an outcropping of shale, and skidded down a long rocky slope into a ravine filled with dead leaves.
A moment later dust kicked back into our faces and Alex rattled down on her stomach, slotting neatly between me and Patrick. Her face held a worn-out frustration that I didn’t recognize. I knew how she felt; it seemed the onslaught would never end.
We lay there, panting against the forty-five-degree slope.
A few precious seconds of rest.
Soon enough the ground started to vibrate against our cheeks. The pitch rose bit by bit until the earth shook with footfalls. Were the Hatchlings going to sniff out our hiding space? The noise grew even louder. Pebbles shook free, raining down across our heads. We had to turn our faces.
The sound grew thunderous. It felt like they were on top of us already. It seemed impossible that they wouldn’t spot us. We braced ourselves, chests heaving.
To our left, way downslope, the semi truck bucked into view, fire erupting from the hood. A stream of Hatchlings followed it. The truck crested a bulge in the mountainside and vanished, hurtling down Ponderosa Pass.
Following its wake, the stream of Hatchlings passed overhead for one full minute. And then another. They seemed to ripple across the earth, their skin changing against the rocky backdrop.
Sometime after minute three, the shimmering movement stopped.
We were still panting.
“My God, Chance,” Alex said. “We’d better take care of that.”
I followed her gaze to where my arm rested on the shale between us. The flesh of my forearm was swollen and red, a massive hive.
A hive in the shape of a three-fingered hand.
* * *
We hiked through the dense woods. Patrick took the lead, shotgun slung back over one shoulder. He bent aside a branch for Alex, and she in turn handed it off to me. We were making decent headway down Ponderosa Pass, though we had to take a meandering route to avoid the one that our burning truck and the Hatchlings had blazed through the woods. On our way we were looking for a cabin, a ranger station, a trailer—anything that might have a first-aid kit.
“We’re not supposed to be alive right now,” Alex said. “We were supposed to take out the Queen, shut down the Hatch site.” A bitter laugh. “Sacrifice ourselves nobly to win the battle.”
“And you’re mad that we survived?” Patrick asked.
“Yeah, I’m mad.”
“Why?”
“Because after what we just saw, winning a battle isn’t enough,” Alex said. “We have to win the war.”
The Rebel helmet swung at my side. How bizarre that neither Patrick nor Alex had asked me about it. I hadn’t had a chance to fill them in on any of it. Not that the fate of the world depended on me and Patrick. Not that we had to stay alive for some mission. Not that I’d met a friggin’ Rebel from outer space who’d told me about the Harvesters.
I said, “About that—”
But Alex wasn’t done talking. “That’s the problem with not dying when you set out to. I mean, you make all your plans. And other stuff, complicated stuff…” She placed another bent-back branch in my hand, and our fingers brushed. “… you think you’re not gonna have to deal with. Because you won’t be around to figure it out. But then—surprise.” She shot me a quick look over her shoulder, which I swear was loaded. “You’re alive. And things are more complicated than ever. And you have to figure it out, no matter who gets hurt.”
My mouth had gone dry.
“We’ll figure it out,” Patrick said. “How to kill those things. But first we gotta get back to town, warn everyone, and regroup. I want Chatterjee’s take on the Hatchlings, too.”
I also wanted to hear what our former biology teacher would have to say about all this.
As Patrick kept on about war strategy, I found myself wondering if I’d mistaken what Alex was saying. Maybe she was just talking about the war. Had I misread her look? Had I misread it because I’d wanted to?
“… has to be a way to inflict bigger damage,” Patrick was saying.
I stared down at the Rebel helmet. Then I cleared my throat. “Look, you guys aren’t gonna believe this.…”
“You ran into a Rebel alien who told you that you and I are the key to the survival of the human race before he evaporated in a puff of smoke?”
My mouth opened. I closed it.
Patrick bulled forward through some dense shrubs. Alex followed him, smirking. She has this smirk that pulls her mouth a little bit to one side.
In case you were wondering.
“Wait,” I said. “How…? When…?”
Patrick reached into his backpack, dug out my well-worn notebook, and slapped it against my chest. “We found your journal in the cabin,” he said.
“But I hid it.”
“I know,” Patrick said. “Under the pillow. Not exactly a mastermind hiding place.”
“Well, I didn’t figure…” What were they doing on the bed?
A memory hit me: My fingers brushing Alex’s neck as I fumble with the clasp of her necklace. Alex leaning into me. Her plush, plush lips.
I shook off the thought. “So you know everything.”
“Everything you wrote down,” Patrick said. “And you were pretty thorough.”
I could’ve sworn that that was loaded, too.
“They chased us half the night,” Alex said. “We had to hide in a gully. We must’ve gotten to the cabin right after they caught you. At first, when you weren’t there…” When she spoke again, she sounded as tough as ever. “But then, like Patrick said. We found it. We knew the early entries, obviously, but we read the end. How you killed the Queen and she was made of mist or whatever. What the Rebel said about you and Patrick needing to carry out some übermission. How the Drones were closing in on you at the cabin.”
“I thought you were crazy with all that stuff,” Patrick said.
“I, on the other hand, thought you were only half crazy,” Alex said.
“So we decided to go in hard.”
I thought of them blazing down the hillside in that semi. “That you did.”
“Patrick followed their tracks,” Alex said. “After a bit it was pretty clear they were taking you to the Hatch site.”
“I thought we might get there too late,” Patrick said. He hooked my neck and pulled me close so our foreheads bumped. Then he stared at me, emotion flickering beneath the surface of his dark eyes. I must’ve grown some, because I didn’t have to tilt my head all the way back to look at his face. I wondered when that had happened.
“If you’d died before we got there,” Patrick said, “I would’ve killed you.”
I smiled, but he didn’t. Patrick doesn’t smile much.
He let go of my neck and started walking again. “Now let’s break into that house and get your arm cleaned up.”
At the same time, Alex and I said, “What house?”
Patrick pointed down below, but I saw nothing except branches and leaves. Alex looked at me with one eyebrow cocked. I gave a shrug. Was he hallucinating?
We cut through a copse of pines, and finally I saw it.
An A-frame built of dark wood nestled into the hillside. Giant windows reflected back the surrounding trees, blending it seamlessly into the forest.
“That’s the problem with you two,” Patrick said. “Too busy yammering to pay attention.”